a MODERN, newly built temple to Zeus in Cyprus.

yeah I dunno what to say, it warms my cold heart ~Chara

I know at least three general sorts of magic-eye tubes, vacuum tubes that have some sort of fluorescent screen that gets bombarded with electron beams which can be moved around via specially placed control plates or grids. I've seen them used as tuning indicators, or as the rough equivalent of LED bar displays (e.g. in graphic equalizers). There's a bunch of styles but these three I've seen for myself:

1. A round conical screen at the top of the tube envelope, and a variable dark sector
2. A flat illuminated strip along the side of the tube envelope, with a dark gap in the middle
3. A concave shell with a glowing inner surface and either one or two dark sectors

And I found myself thinking...that's just barely enough to make facial expressions with, I think? The eyes and mouth would be obvious enough, anyway

~Chara of Pnictogen

I'm not sure exactly how intentional it was, but Stuart Gordon's Dagon's contains a sequence of immense and disturbing power to anyone who knows about the participation of the Spanish Catholic Church in the oppression of the people: when Capitán Cambarro rebels against the established order of Imboca in order to bring in the worship of Dagon, he and his pals smash up the Catholic Church and murder the priest. Such things happened during the founding of the Spanish Republic in revenge for the complicity of the Church with the corrupt and brutal Bourbon monarchy; churches were destroyed and their priests slain. That might shock a Christian reader, but the people of Spain had reason to feel that the Church had betrayed them. Dagon gives us a just a little taste of that historical episode.

The people of Imboca also feel betrayed by their Church but for a different reason: they'd been a fishing town and now there's no fish, so the town is slowly dying and the Church offers the people nothing but unanswered prayers (suddenly I'm reminded of Night in the Woods and another town that was healthy only so long as there was a resource to be extracted.) When Capitán Cambarro claims that his new god will actually answer their prayers, they listen! Sure, it means in the long run that the human inhabitants of Imboca end up forced to cede their humanity to become "children of Dagon", but the film dares to suggest that the system does work in a way. There is a strange society here in Imboca but a functioning one, and it makes sense to the citizens (at least those with significant dialogue.)

It's fairly plain that a moderate fraction of U.S. Christendom has become, in its way, something like the Esoterica Orde de Dagon seen above. There's a multitude of organizations and groups and sects and individual worshippers with strange new beliefs but who retain some outward façade of Christianity, some of the trappings and symbols, rather like Capitán Cambarro still making use of the Catholic church for his new Dagon cult. The substitution is possible because the new beliefs offer some practical approximation of the central promises of Christianity: a spiritual home, a sense of family and destiny, and the promise of life eternal if you do everything the right way. Paul Marsh, or Pablo Cambarro, gets to have a long life in the Sea as one of the children of Dagon (presumably) with his new wife who is also his sister, Dagonic customs being what they are, with access to a mountain of gold treasures. Arguably that's better than being a dweeby techbro perched uncertainly atop a pile of Internet-startup "wealth" and constantly fretting about his portfolio.

It suddenly occurs to me that Pablo might decide to bring Imboca into the Internet age, come to think of it.

~Chara of Pnictogen

Even though I'm pretty sure the decision was motivated by B-movie making logic, the best thing that Stuart Gordon ever did for H. P. Lovecraft was move the setting to a Spanish coastal town, and rejiggering the story so that Gordon's version of Innsmouth, the creepy village of Imboca, is effectively alien to two cultures at once. Both the pasty American husband, Paul, and his sophisticated and urban Spanish wife, Barbara, are unable to deal with the weirdness of this very alien place. It's already not home to Paul, who clearly feels a little guilty (as do many second-generation immigrants in the U.S., including Frisk and myself) that he never learned anything about his Spanish heritage from his mother. But it's even alien to Barbara, who ought to be more at home in Imboca, and that more than doubles the horror. And when you find out that Spanish acting legend Francisco Rabal is reduced to huddling in crawlspaces? Nasty.

I suspect that H. P. Lovecraft, thanks to the racism that underscores his weird writings, is probably best adapted indirectly, in Dagon fashion. Gordon's decision to make Paul Marsh a second-generation Spanish immigrant was brilliant. It grounds the horror of Gordon's Dagon in something far more human and understandable than the prissy fears of the typical Lovecraft protagonist. ("You mean I'm NOT an 18th colonial squire??" faints) It also lends genuine emotional weight to the final reunion between father and son. Imagine being called by your original name for the first time in your life since...before you can remember.

Also this is one of the best looking cheap films I've ever seen. There's a few loosey-goosey process shots but otherwise the production feels really professional and solid to me.

~Chara of Pnictogen